Development and Validation of Iranian version of privacy inventory in hospitalized patients

Privacy is a complex phenomenon that has various interpretations within healthcare systems. Understanding and measurement of this concept is essential for care providers. This study aimed to design and test the psychometrics of the hospitalized patient privacy measurement instrument.

The present study is a sequential exploratory study of instrumentation that was conducted in 2018 in three consecutive steps. In the first step, the concept of privacy was defined using hybrid concept analysis. In the second step, items were produced based on the first step findings. In the third step, 300 patients hospitalized in internal and surgical wards of public hospitals in Tehran completed an instrument for census sampling in order to evaluate instrumental psychometric features.

Based on the obtained findings from content analysis, the initial pool of questions included 91 items, which dropped to 74 by eliminating repetitive and overlapping items. After formal and content validation and item analysis, a total of 19 items remained. The overall content index of the instrument was 0.81. The results of exploratory factor analysis including personal privacy, psychosocial privacy, and spiritual-religious privacy were identified as 45.5% of the total variance. Instrument reliability was obtained by using Cronbachchr(chr(chr('39')39chr('39'))39chr(chr('39')39chr('39')))s alpha coefficient of 0.856 and the intra-class correlation of 0.95.

Research findings provide new insight into the patients’ privacy implications and introduce PPI as a simple, valid, and reliable instrument for measuring the privacy of patients in general admissions departments.